


What Kingdom Hearts means to me

by violethowler



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Essays, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Written Pre-Kingdom Hearts III
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 15:51:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18831799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violethowler/pseuds/violethowler
Summary: An essay on how much Kingdom Hearts has meant to me throughout my life.Written the day of Kingdom Hearts III's release.





	What Kingdom Hearts means to me

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this to express how much the release of Kingdom Hearts III means to me, and while the game's been out for nearly four months now, I thought I should preserve my thoughts in the Archive.

Holding the physical copy of Kingdom Hearts III that I pre-ordered and paid extra to have delivered on release day is a surreal experience. It feels like a dream in all honesty. Kingdom Hearts III used to be a formless thing. A cryptid that fans hoped to catch a glimpse of but didn’t really believe existed. To put it into perspective, Kingdom Hearts II first released when I was in third grade, and I’m currently approaching my graduation from college. Six games have been released in the last decade and a half to expand on the series’ lore and set up the major pieces for the next “main” installment, but only now are we getting Kingdom Hearts III. This franchise has been with me through middle school, high school, and college. It’s a big deal.

I had never been passionately into video games as a kid. My first game system was the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, and the only games I was interested in playing were movie tie-in games that adapted the plot of a specific movie. The Incredibles. The Polar Express. Ice Age: The Meltdown, Madagascar. The only other game I can remember that wasn’t an adaptation of an existing film was a weird 3D Pacman game, but I don’t remember ever playing it as fervently as I did those old movie games.

Even after receiving a PlayStation 2 for either my birthday or Christmas in 2006, the only games I would play that weren’t movie adaptations were the NickToons crossover games like Battle for Volcano Island or Attack of the Toybots. But I only played them because they featured my favorite TV characters. I was never interested in the storyline. That would change one day in late-summer/early autumn 2007, when, after seeing an advertisement for it in my old Disney Adventures magazines, I rented a PlayStation title I’d never heard of called Kingdom Hearts II. 

In the beginning, I didn’t pay attention to the story. I just skipped through the cutscenes and focused exclusively on the gameplay. But as I got to the more difficult portions of the game, I started to watch the cutscenes and pay attention to the story. And the more I did, the more I fell in love with it. Once I had fully digested the story of Kingdom Hearts II, I wanted more. I went back and played the original Kingdom Hearts, then I got Chain of Memories for my GBA. I was hooked. I started buying and reading the manga adaptations of the games. I bought a couple of collectible figurines. I. Was. Obsessed.

I spent much of my computer time in those days scouring the internet for every scrap of information I could find on the next games in the franchise. Kingdom Hearts III wasn’t in the cards yet, so I focused my attention on the three titles that I vaguely recall being collectively referred to at the time as “the handheld trilogy”: 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, and Coded. I searched with a fine-tooth comb on websites dedicated to gaming news in general and Kingdom Hearts specifically, hoping to find out more about these next three games.

In many ways, Kingdom Hearts helped me take my first tentative steps into the wider community of fandom. My search for news on the next games in the series unearthed funny fan-made comic strips about my favorite characters. Even though Kingdom Hearts III was still a fantasy by that point, I found people using Photoshop, or whatever image-editing software was popular around 2008 or so, to create ideas for what the cover art would look like. I found detailed fan art of potential new outfits for all the major characters. I found theories and ideas and the ever-raging bonfire of speculation that grows larger with each new game released. I found fan-made music videos and fanfiction to sate my hunger for more content between games. I wasn’t as involved in fandom to the extent that I am today, but my experience with Kingdom Hearts helped me dip my toes in the water, so to speak, as I started to engage more with my favorite media beyond simply consuming it once and then going back to watch/play it again when I needed something to do.

And what makes this day so much sweeter is how much effort Disney is clearly putting into promoting this game. Almost a decade ago, the most advertising any Kingdom Hearts title got outside of dedicated gaming magazines or events was maybe a single tv commercial per game. The only way to know a new game was coming otherwise was if you were actively following the development of each title before they even locked in when it would come out. In the last six months of waiting for Kingdom Hearts III, there’s been a concert tour, multiple commercials and advertisements on both TV and social media, and even ads playing before the previews at movie theaters. After years of trying to share my love for this series, only for a handful of people to have ever heard of it, it’s a tremendous thrill to see the games I love finally getting mainstream recognition.

It’s because of this series that I even consider myself a gamer in the first place. Before Kingdom Hearts, I just plowed through every game I had, treating each level as just another puzzle or challenge to complete. But Kingdom Hearts II exposed me to the possibility of video games as a medium for storytelling, and it was through my engagement with the Kingdom Hearts storyline that I found myself seeking out other games with their own compelling stories. Final Fantasy, The World Ends with You, Horizon: Zero Dawn… These are some of the many games with stories and worlds that have enthralled me as someone who loves to both experience stories and create them. And without Kingdom Hearts, I would probably have never been enough of a gamer to know or care that they existed.

When I was younger, I was only interested in games if they were available on the systems I had. But Kingdom Hearts wasn’t limited to only one console. In the early years of the franchise, the series was spread across the GameBoy Advance, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and smartphones. So, whenever my research uncovered that the next title would be on a console I didn’t own, I would go out of my way to get it, either by putting it on my holiday wish list, or by saving up the money for it myself. And usually, I would buy these platforms years in advance of the Kingdom Hearts game I’d got it for came out, so I would search for interesting games to play on it while I waited. And unlike before, now I was actively looking for things to play.

When it was just my GameBoy, PlayStation, and a handful of movie/TV show tie-ins, I didn’t go out of my way to look for new games. I relied on advertisements in my trusty Disney Adventures magazine to tell me what games that were out that might interest me. Nowadays, I annually watch live coverage of E3, the entertainment expo where game developers show off the status of their current projects or unveil their next main title. And I keep my eyes out for every title that looks entertaining from both a gameplay and story perspective, whether I see ads in a magazine, footage at E3, a trailer on YouTube, or fanart online. 

Before I realized that animation was what I wanted to do as a career, my first dream job was to be a game designer. And if your first guess as to why I wanted to pursue that career path isn’t Kingdom Hearts, then in the words of Ansem, Seeker of Darkness - one of the franchise’s original villains - “You have come this far, and still, you understand nothing.” While I ultimately realized that animation was my true passion as an artist, it was Kingdom Hearts that set me on the idea of turning my art skills into a career. Without Kingdom Hearts, I might not have ended up where I am today.  

Most of the fandom knows that Kingdom Hearts III isn’t the end of the road for the franchise. Even aside from its immense popularity, series director Tetsuya Nomura has spoken about the fact that the series will continue beyond III, but that this represents the conclusion of the current story arc that has been going on since the original Kingdom Hearts game back in 2002. It’s fitting that this arc of the series is ending the same year that I graduate from college. This series has seen me through multiple chapters of my life. Middle school. High School. College. And in May, I’ll be a college graduate looking for a job. Each time I moved from one stage of life to the next, it always felt like the end. But it never is. Life goes on. The story will go on, but this chapter of it is over.

You can imagine, then, why today is such a big deal. This series has been with me for more than half my life. These games, and other media I obsess over to a similar degree, mean so much to be precisely because the story and characters connect with me on such a deep emotional level. My opinion on storytelling in any medium is that the ones that put your emotions in a blender; that bounce you back and forth between screaming in anguish and crying tears of joy in the span of a few hours or less are the ones that deserve to be remembered. The best stories should leave you wanting to know more, not just out of curiosity over what happens next, but also for the satisfaction of knowing that the characters you’ve grown to love will be alright.

Kingdom Hearts has consistently checked every single one of those boxes for me for as long as I’ve been playing it. Even the prequels and mid-quels that ended in tragedy and heartbreak still had a note of assurance that there was still hope. Even if, by some fluke, future games didn’t have the same emotional impact on me that the pre-III ones did, I will never be able to stop loving the series I grew up with. I’ve been invested in it for so long that it feels like it’s woven into my DNA. This series has grown over the last eleven years just as I have, and whatever the future holds for the franchise, good or bad, I will never regret the time I’ve spent with this incredible saga.


End file.
